Friday, November 30, 2012

•If you think yesterday’s blog entry (about Katie Pavlich’s
book alleging the government made no serious effort to track the guns sold in
Operation: Fast and Furious) was unsettling, considerthe darker theory pushed by Steven Hager
writing in the January 2013 issue of High
Times (I may be moderating a panel featuring one of their editors). He argues that Fast and Furious seems to have
been merely a case of the U.S. trying to aid one drug cartel against another (specifically, the Sinaloa against
the Zeta).

Legalize – not just in Colorado and Washington State but
everywhere – and this carnage, far more damaging than drugs themselves,
ends.

•In the meantime, who needs Red Dawn when we have a real war on the Southern border?

Nonetheless, I saw that goofy-but-enjoyable film this week,
along with the vastly superior Argo,
which is probably the best movie of the year – and close to my heart, since I
was one of the kids who read and believed the publicity back in 1980 for the
sci-fi movie that the CIA was pretending to produce in order to move in and out
of Iran.Though it’s not mentioned in Argo, they even hired comics artist Jack
Kirby back in the day to help plan god costumes and designs for an amusement
park, basing it all on the great Roger Zelazny novel Lord of Light, which is actually Hindu-influenced rather than
Iranian-influenced.

Speaking of which, in a sign of how much times have changed
since the original Red Dawn, the
group I saw the remake with included a libertarian Indian immigrant and a
couple guys, one a gung-ho Wall Streeter, who (really) train with guns and bows more because the U.S. government makes them nervous than because they
fear the North Koreans (or whoever).More strangely, it looked at one point as if we might be joined by a Russian-born
ex-broker who now works for the U.N.I’m
not sure she even saw the irony.

•Comparably politically eclectic is the cast of characters
from Occupy Wall Street who Bobby Black describes meeting in that
aforementioned January 2013 issue of High
Times.The movement began in
downtown Manhattan (mere blocks from the tall, twisty new Frank Gehry
skyscraper seen nearby in a pic I took), but as Black explains, by July 4,
2012, ten months later, it had convened a faux constitutional convention in
Philadelphia (about two hours away).And
they weren’t all just Marxist hippies.

Black, with a mixture of amusement and pride at being a
participant, describes the stubborn, wheelchair-bound but admirably anti-Americans
with Disabilities Act libertarian named Robert he met, as well as a
self-proclaimed dreds-wearing “conservative” named Kronos (not to be confused with
the giant invading alien
machine Kronos). Kronos was angry
that conservatives’ desires weren’t part of the Declaration-like agenda put
together in Philly. Bobby argued with
him at one point, defending the status of his own faith – Wicca – as a
religion, leading conservative Kronos to confess he is himself a pagan, helping
them to bond.

On that bridge-building note, let us look forward to similar
lessons in coexistence in the form of a few book and film entries during
December, which will be a “Month of Dogmatism” on this now lower-frequency but
still wise blog.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

The Phillips Foundation gave me a copy of Fast and Furious: Barack Obama’s Bloodiest
Scandal and the Shameless Cover-Up by Katie Pavlich, and I later gave
it to a gun aficionado I know, planning to track its location and take him down
if he misuses the book, but then I got distracted by other stuff, so, eh, you
know, whatever.(In fact, I passed it
along at an art show featuring odd works by Max Eisenberg such as the ones seen
in the nearby photo.)

Seriously, though, even
if you thought it was in theory a good idea for the U.S. government to sell
lots of guns to Mexican drug cartels (many that went on to be used in actual
murders) in hopes of tracking them later and busting their users (not a
manifestly impossible thing), and even if
no net increase in deaths occurred as a result of Operation: Fast and Furious
(a possibility I suggested to Pavlich myself, since every good gun rights
defender knows that guns that can’t be bought by Route A will likely just be
bought via Route B anyway), and even if
you’re naive enough to think that Attorney General Eric Holder would never lie,
you should be troubled by the fact that the government does not in fact seem to have made any
serious effort to track the guns later.

As Pavlich recounts, one agent was so alarmed by this
neglect that he stuck a tracking device of his own in one of the guns, though
it later stopped operating.Making matters
worse, it appears that even while the Obama administration was actively
encouraging gun dealers to keep selling to Mexican criminals – even telling the
dealers not to be alarmed when they dutifully reported their concerns to the
government – the administration was seizing the opportunity to publicly condemn
the very same flow of guns to Mexico, implying that gun dealers cannot be
trusted (and your government can).

Given the lapdog press’s eager role in sanitizing all this,
I’m rather pleased to see Fast
and Furious whistleblower John Dodson suing the New York Times for libel.Obviously,
the press has the right to be wrong, and few such suits succeed, but I’m not
against libel laws when the mistakes are sufficiently knowing, vicious, and
damaging.Such suits may be an important
tool of resistance, given the increasingly disturbing and monolithic role
played by the establishment press in aiding the government in its crimes – and
given the press’s ever more brazenly partisan nature.

(There was much joking online, for example, about the
contrast between the press’s immediate post-election freakout over Rubio’s
agnosticism about creationism and their total silence over Obama’s own agnosticism,
worded in almost the same way, on the same topic.Luckily, that’s a mostly-silly issue that
doesn’t tend to get anyone killed.The
government can’t stop evolution, not even with a full-fledged nuclear
war.)

Government is bullying, secrecy, ineptitude, organized
crime, inefficiency, and the public’s misplaced philosophical hopes all at the
same time.We would be better off
without it, whether here or in Latin America.(Of course, sometimes you can’t blame cops for deviating from protocol a
bit, as in this darkly
amusing 911 call.)

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

I suppose I should be grateful that despite the fact that
in the last few months of the campaign Romney and Obama almost turned the election into a big government-vs.-capitalism
referendum (which at this juncture in history it probably ought to have been and which I would have taken firmer sides on),
many are concluding that it was in large part the small (and greatly
exaggerated) handful of sex-focused social conservatives who ruined everything
for the Republicans, rescuing Obama from the econ-oriented vagina dentata of
defeat.

Given the fact that two flourishing strains of
libertarianism right now (contrary to what we might have expected prior to
Bush) seem to be the paleolibertarian and the (more or less) left-libertarian
varieties, not the establishment-rationalizing varieties, we should be grateful
for writers like Dan
McCarthy (self-proclaimed Tory Anarchist) reframing traditionalism itself as a
diversity- and liberty-affirming thing.The “tradition is simple and now it shall be imposed by force” approach
of, say, your average Santorum fan is both ahistorical and electorally doomed
(so let’s get back to econ, I say, but I realize people have a range of other
interests, including vaginas).

As for me, post-election I’m trying to spend less time
online in part so I get some real paying work done and don’t starve but also
because the Internet just shows you how many endless arguments all the people
you like are having with each other, and it’s wearying.Hell, given dumb things they said or did, I
end the election season vowing to boycott Joss Whedon/the Avengers, Will
Ferrell, Katy Perry, and The Simpsons,
though none of these are big losses (life is short).

I’m not boycotting the entire sixth or so of the population
that voted for Obama (and let us not exaggerate: it was only about that many,
and they had their reasons), just a handful whose support for him was so
gratuitous that it interfered with their creativity and did so in an obnoxious
way.I once assumed everyone looked at
old films of servile subjects idolizing FDR and his ilk (singing and dancing
for the vaunted leader, etc.) and considered those long-ago performers pitiable
and naive, lacking in our era’s healthy skepticism and sense of irony.Apparently, I was dangerously wrong.

And what are we to make of the fact that purportedly
society-dominating whites voted for Romney over Obama by about 3 to 2 and still
lost?That’s where Joan Walsh comes in,
so I went to see her talk two days ago.

•••

I genuinely do not want whites to start turning into another
ethno-obsessive grievance group (that way lies real trouble for everyone), but precisely because of that, I hope
the left doesn’t get too fond of the triumphalist meme about demographic
diversity dooming those laughable old white men (Romney, as I think we all
know, was an Ivy League New England moderate, for crying out loud – that’s part
of the reason the right and I weren’t so in love with him – so if we start
regarding even him as akin to a
Klansman, we really must be living in an unrecognizably and overwhelmingly left-wing
nation, and I don’t think that’s quite true, not just yet).

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

In the grand scheme of things, elections are an arbitrary,
overrated chronological dividing line – but this month’s are as apt a time as
any to make good on my long-threatened
hermitage from the Net.I’ll mostly
stop blogging, Facebook-updating, Facebook-group-participating, tweeting, and
even e-mailing for now – except to notify people about once a month of the
latest Dionysium event (and probably to review a book or film once in a while).

I won’t be idle – on the contrary, the times demand more
focused attention on larger-scale projects (articles, ghostwriting, etc. – to
which I’m happy to add something FOR YOU if you pay me).If I am to rescue this culture, I must
perform labors grander even than the ones imagined by those who preceded me in
the Crif Dogs bathroom seen in the adjacent photos.

Here are a dozen things to consider in my quasi-absence:

(1) My e-mail address
remains the same (first name last name at Earthlink dot net) despite my
profile picture getting another update, as seen above.I will try to bombard you less but will still be receiving and will probably notice
messages via that medium faster than others.

(2) I have learned
important things during my comparatively short two years of using Facebook and
Twitter, lessons about linearity and argumentation and how both break down
under the pressures and speed of modern media, lessons applicable to incipient
new projects.It probably also makes it
easier to follow a movie like Cloud Atlas
(which I liked – as I did Skyfall,
though both got negative reviews from contrarian Kyle Smith).

Still, having been joke-exiled from a notorious
anarcho-capitalist Facebook page in the past few days makes this seem like a
good time to quit all Facebook pages and warn the world that it may take me a
while to respond to messages and requests sent via that double-edged,
loved/hated medium.

(4) And yet, if irked libertarians tried to get him fired
for saying that, one other libertarian
would likely defend him (and anyone threatened with expulsion from a
publicly-funded, First Amendment-bound university for unpopular ideas), namely
Greg Lukianoff, who warns against campus censorship in his new book Unlearning
Liberty, all proceeds from which go to the speech-defending group FIRE.

If they do so, I would imagine there will be many meetings
in the near future involving government bureaucrats saying, “Why, these people
hate us!The ingrates!What’s wrong with them?”

(7) As some of my Facebook pals subversively-comedically
“troll” each other, I ask them to remember
and honor the world’s most important troll religion, now over thirty years
old: the Church of the SubGenius, whose out-of-the-blue ad on MTV
startled the world twenty years ago.(It
can’t be considered the first troll
religion, though, not if that ancient snake-puppet cult Alan Moore follows
counts.Rev. Jen Miller’s Troll Museum
is a totally separate phenomenon.)

(8) I blogged almost daily (about two days out of three,
really) from the Republicans’ ouster from Congress after the 2006 elections
through the re-election of Obama in 2012.The one encouraging thing I’ll say about that span of time is that it
began with the Republicans barely aware that they were entering a period in the
wilderness (with the wars continuing and the financial crisis on the horizon)
but ends with many of them talking about libertarianism
as a possible route out (and about a possible Rand Paul 2016 presidential
run – not that any one politician or election can solve our problems, as even
some liberals may now realize, despite four years of truly shocking,
self-abasing hero-worship on their part).

And he’s right, you know.Civilized people do not govern one another.I must make a more concerted effort in the
years ahead to teach mainstream Americans the basics of anarcho-capitalist
thinking, which is, after all, just basic commonsense economics.

On the bright side, I finally realized that Obama reminds me
of Tuvok (not
Tupac), and there’s some reassurance in that.At least we are sometimes oppressed by geeks.

(9) Not only am I so
geeky that I’ll still be posting Dionysium and Book Notes entries here
while mostly “offline,” the truth is that I already know what the theme of next
month’s book entries will be.So be here
for my “Month of Dogmatism,” as we look at an article on that subject from Critical
Review plus the books The Righteous Mind
and the olive-branch-extending Free
Market Fairness.

Hey, it’s funnier
than Andy Borowitz.Everything is.The only way I can explain the complete
absence of jokes from his pieces is that he is actively hoping people will mistake his “parodic” news pieces for real ones,
providing the dupes with additional ammunition against the Republicans.Facts don’t matter much to the left anyway.Why should they matter to a man falsely
claiming to be a humorist, or to his readers?One would hope the absence of both facts and jokes mattered to his editors, but apparently that is not the
case.

(11) Since my real
message is basic econ and its implications for individual freedom (and why
government must be abolished), you could also occupy yourselves with CEI’s great
six-minute I, Pencil: The Movie,
based on the classic essay (itself reportedly inspired by meditation in turn
influenced by LSD culture) explaining the unplanned yet interconnected nature
of a market economy.

I question whether
even Nobelists need to know math, given Krugman’s recent praise of the days of
91% tax rates.And so I need to consider
more seriously how best to explain to a credentials-worshiping world that I do
in fact have a better understanding of economics than this Nobel Prize
winner.(Let the rich make money, then
take almost all of it away?Sure, why not?Can’t see how that would affect incentives at
all or might have proven unsustainable in the long run if it had endured more
than a few years, Paul.You’re a
genius.Why do the evil Republicans keep
mounting their irrational attacks on you?They must know there are no
other countries, such as Canada, to which a businessman could easily flee these
days – more easily than ever, in fact – if threatened with 91% tax rates.)

(12) They can put
you in jail for breaking their laws.They
can’t (yet) jail you for changing your mind.Do it.

If you are a liberal (in the modern,
welfare-statist sense): change
this very moment.

And if you are a
libertarian or conservative, do not despair over the next four years.We are seeing some phenomena that are better than a
Romney presidency likely would have been.Not only is Rand Paul talked about as a new force to be reckoned with in
the Senate (pushing spending cuts, drug legalization, fewer wars, and
immigration reform) but we have petitions from multiple states urging
secession.Fantastic.Given our federalist system, that may be our
best hope anyway.

And there’s the
whole Petraeus/Middle East multilayered mess to watch.Who ever would’ve thought we’d enter this President’s second term asking how
much he knew about the al Qaeda attacks of September 11 and when – and what the
role of the FBI and the CIA were in the disaster?

And if you are a believer in the paranormal, you can also change your mind.

The second most
important thing I learned about humanity from spending a lot of time online
over the past couple years (after learning that people have a lot of stupid
political arguments) is that no amount of terrible YouTube videos, no matter
how blurry and Rorschach-blot-like, will ever convince people that we lack good
evidence for Bigfoot or UFOs.Luckily, just
as the James Randi Educational Foundation offers a prize of over $1 million for
any demonstration of paranormal powers
and finds (surprise!) no takers, Spike TV now offers $10 million for
irrefutable Bigfoot evidence (as a promo for their new show 10 Million Dollar Bigfoot Bounty).Not holding my breath.(I will also offer you $20 trillion for
evidence there’s a God.)

Thursday, November 15, 2012

I'll bet for sufficiently psychologicallly-insightful writer types, there can be few experiences that make you feel older than watching early twentysomethings do half-comedic onstage presentations (of which there are a million in this town) featuring some sort of endearingly-stiff inter-host repartee like:

BILL: Oh...kaaaay...well. We have a big show for you tonight.

BOB [even more stiffly]: At least we think it's big.

BILL: We will try. We will try, anyway, to bring you a big show. We have the big audio-visual set-up, you can plainly see. Isn't that right, Bob?

BOB: It certainly is.

It always sort of works...and the audience does not know that it seems familiar and funny because, just like toddlers still fascinated by the basic mechanics of walking, they, as twentysomethings, are still learning the basic mechanics of things like speaking formally and addressing large groups. And in time it will all be rote or instinctual -- and not so funny or new anymore.

And then either they will stop going to such comedy shows or, in some cynical cases, they will decide they can make jokes that way themselves throughout an entire career as a sitcom writer -- though on some level they'll know they're squeezing out product from a tube for younger, more naive minds much like fiftysomething, balding record execs hiring ex-Mousketeers to make simple music for teens.

But meanwhile, the comedy audiences will tell themselves they are really the first generation ever to laugh at this sort of self-aware stiffness and awkwardness -- because all prior generations must have lacked irony and perspective, possibly lacked intelligence itself. And the teens buying the ex-Mousketeer music will think they invented the music all on their own -- and that all prior generations must have lacked taste.

And the stiff, awkward, self-congratulatory process will never end, just as the left keeps thinking it has invented anew the idea of replacing markets with central planning in the name of a newfound compassion (this time for sure).

Though they are rarer than pro-government and pro-church documents, there are notes from scribes centuries old marveling at the stupid things people do and believe -- and wondering if the future will be any different. And it won't, not really.

It's not very libertarian (and certainly not very
bourgeois-friendly) to denounce most of society until utopia comes – as some of
the more radical libertarians I know may sometimes be prone to do (and
selective denunciation leads to weird, fashionable outcomes not so different
than those that occur when some paleolibertarian types denounce, say, the
biotech firm Monsanto but do so only by grasping for libertarian rationales
that could as easily be used to condemn almost any firm in the current mixed
economy and will likely be used to attack different targets if and when public
paranoia over biotech passes).

I think the separate and more familiar group of
"liberal-tarians" make a comparable mistake but not quite the same
one, namely denouncing aspects of society the left doesn't like and declaring
it a necessary part of libertarianism to make such denunciations – even without demonstrating that those things
are caused by government (and not fully articulating why else we must denounce them, aside from highly contestable,
mostly unspoken, left-liberal assumptions about what aspects of autonomy all good-hearted, enlightened
people value or which aspects of non-violent, non-governmental social pressure all good-hearted,
enlightened people condemn – without quite daring to take the bizarre position
that people cannot exert any kind of even voluntary pressure, such as whining,
on one another).

So the left-libertarians may blame too many things on
government, and the liberal-tarians may simply be directing blame at too may
things in general, without carefully tracing the causes of those things.Yet the default social patterns of an
unharassed bourgeoisie might well be
the most utile patterns, long-term – to
present a complex, more right-libertarian (and more widely-held) view in one
short sentence.

Monday, November 12, 2012

•I enjoyed both Cloud
Atlas and Skyfall, though the
latter’s nicely-done opening-credits music sequence reminded me that the
previous Bond movie started with one of Jack White’s biggest
mistakes – and a side effect was that we never heard the song Shirley Bassey
recorded for Quantum of Solace, which
would have been #4 for the aged Ms. Bassey, and that’d be kinda cool.

The year’s cinematic espionage isn’t over for me, though –
now to see Argo and, next month, Zero Dark Thirty, about spies fighting
Iranians and bin Laden, respectively.

•That reminds me: this week brings both Veteran’s Day and
Islamic New Year, so tonight is the perfect time to join us at Muchmore’s (tonight
at 9:30 at 2 Havemeyer St. near the Bedford Ave. stop in Williamsburg) for a multi-faction DIONYSIUM panel reacting to
the election: Occupyparticipant Karanja “Speshul K” Gacuca
(privately favoring Obama), Maine GOP
senatorial candidate’s daughter Tricia Summers, Lawyers for Obama co-founder Vijay Dewan, and Libertarian Party writer for Gary Johnson Jeremy Kareken.

•I will mainly just be moderating, though it is tempting to
weigh in and note how badly we need
education in economics to prevent disasters like Obama (or, for example,
Bush) from happening.These
are just a few obscure Twitter users, but see how they take potential
layoffs caused by Obamacare as a sign that the businesses involved are simply slackers and shirkers – rather than
economic agents striving always to make as much money as they can under adverse
conditions.This is Soviet thinking, and
I no longer think it likely to lead to non-Soviet ends.

In short: if economic regulations have consequences,
liberals say: shoot the messenger,
not the regulators.No longer profitable
for you to keep hiring people?You
should do it anyway.You thought you
went into business because there was the chance to profit?Nope, your new job is to keep doing what you
do even when it’s not worth it to you, to keep up appearances and make Obama
look good.Your employees don’t come in
to work out of charity, but you should keep striving to come up with ways to
cope with increasingly burdensome regulations just out of a sense of public
duty.There isn’t much hope for this
country until far more people learn basic econ.

I’m reminded that a purported “comedienne” who unfriended me
has been exulting for days online about how Obama being reelected means evil
Republicans being justly harmed and means cultural and economic bigotry taking a hit and – as if
responding to price signals is another version of hating gay people. (Moved your business to another state so you
could survive the tax burden and expand instead of contract?Want well-run private schools instead of
badly-run government ones?You must hate the poor, you monster.Liberals have the obviously-best policies,
after all, so it can’t be that you honestly disagree with them.)

I admit that I (far more plausibly yet far more reluctantly)
do worry that by trying to treat leftists
civilly in the decades during which I’ve lived among them in the Northeast, I’ve
contributed to the harm these people do instead of enlightening them – but I by
contrast will keep at it instead of cutting them off.Cut them off and I might accomplish nothing
at all.

•In fact, I’ll surely talk to a leftist or two when I give my own reactions to the election (and to tonight’s Dionysium panel) on the Web show Rew and Who?And you can watch me doing so here
or live and in person (say hello) this Friday at 5:15 Eastern at Branded Saloon
(at 603 Vanderbilt Ave. at the corner of Bergen Ave. in Brooklyn, near the B,
Q, and C).Clips will likely be posted
later here.

P.S. Some might consider following my example and attending
the 7:15pm Empiricist League event hosted by Lefty Leibowitz beforehand at
nearby Public Assembly (70 N. 6th St.), about possible world-ending scenarios,
before heading over to the 9:30pm Dionysium at Muchmore's.

P.P.S. And a few of you, like me, may have gone to a Stossel taping, an Atlas Network event,
and the Bastiat Awards (sponsored by Reason and in my case provided with a
couple seats by the Phillips Foundation), but you can rest up over the week and
be ready for more politics by Monday, I’m sure.

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Here are my apologies to seven distinct groups, in
descending order of nobility, prior to me taking a big vacation from the
Internet, political squabbling, and other time-consuming activities, commencing
right after the election.

1. I apologize to
Manhattanites, who are more reluctant to take the L subway one stop into
Williamsburg than you might think, despite its obvious hip allure.

Nonetheless, the
DIONSYIUM could use a couple more politically-active panelists for our
fast-approaching Mon., Nov. 12 (9:30pm) post-election panel (we could use a
mainstream, Romney-boosting Republican right now, and a Greenish or Progressive
leftist too far left to vote for Obama might be interesting), SO E-MAIL ME NOW
(at gmail with a dot between my first name and correctly-spelled last name) IF
YOU CAN VOLUNTEER TODAY.

I would like to resist the temptation for the libertarians
to just argue among themselves, though we certainly can.In fact...

2. I apologize to the
liberal-tarians.Or at least, I
think the left-libertarian symposium that they’re doing as I type this over on BleedingHeartLibertarians.com
is likely to prove there are interesting distinctions between the
left-libertarians and the liberal-tarians, the latter of whom I have more often
sparred with.

Still, sadly, you could create a fuller taxonomy of
libertarian types that was defined largely by each faction’s obvious
errors.One way to put it would be to
say:

•Left-libertarians think that other radical movements are
their friends.

•Liberal-tarians think that the welfare state, with tweaks,
is their friend.

•Reason-style “lifestyle libertarians” think that sex-and-drug-loving
liberals are their friends.

•“Mainstream” libertarians focused on “fiscal conservatism”
often think the Republicans are their friends.

•Libertarian Party loyalists think American voters and
citizens are their friends.

In truth, of course, libertarians do not have friends.The principled-non-voter libertarians may
come closest to understanding this, though they sometimes have imaginary
friends (and enemies).

Seriously, though, if those of us voting Gary Johnson today
help keep Romney from the White House, it will be interesting to see if we
retain any friends at all, though we’ll at least get some publicity and
possibly tee up a far more consequential Rand Paul 2016 run.And indeed, I think Rand Paul’s improbable
but promising coalition of Tea Party, libertarian, Republican,
paleoconservative, and antiwar folk may, for all its imperfections, be the most
promising route to (eventual) victory since the late lamented Reagan coalition
that shaped my teenage mind.

Of course, if Romney wins, the more moderate and mainstream
fiscal-conservative approach (rather Reagan-like) may carry the day.If he does not, he almost immediately becomes
as irrelevant as McCain – and the infighting begins in earnest.

I’ll say this for Mitt, though, whether he is poised for an
exit or a first term in the Oval Office: his opponents have mainly gotten
traction by painting him as an icon of the dreaded “1%,” but sooner or later
everyone across the political spectrum is going to have get better at
understanding and articulating the fact that the real wealth of the 1% is not
their stuff – nor is that what we should be trying to spread around to the
masses – but rather their habits,
which (no matter how stupid these people may be individually, and many are) are
the real keys to wealth production – and are fragile social practices that can
be destroyed through bad incentives such as teaching people that governmental
pull, not entrepreneurial creativity, is the route to success.

We owe it to humanity to teach everyone to act rich, crudely
put – and not to teach the rich to act like welfare recipients instead.Civilization is not a place or a heap of
stuff.It’s a set of practices –
including rights and commerce.If we
destroy those practices, we’re going to starve and die.

3. I apologize to
writers.Perhaps I should be honing
my craft, as once-central liberal-tarians Will Wilkinson and Kerry Howley have
semi-exited politics to do, perhaps wisely (though they are among a few
acquaintances of mine to praise an essay about writerly inspiration that was
decorated with the comet-riding unicorn seen above, which is dismaying).To compensate for obsessing over politics
more than art, I hereby offer one small piece of advice for writers, to help
elevate the craft:

HINT FOR WRITERS: Please don’t create a movie, book, or TV
series based on the premise that a mysterious Event occurs that will take many
seasons (or the full length of the film) to understand and in the meantime
leaves a small, random assortment of seemingly-ordinary people superpowered,
amnesiac, stuck on an island, or otherwise cut off from the rest of society
while pursued by a mysterious government, corporate, or occult conspiracy.

4. My apologies to
BIGFOOT if he exists.Indeed, while
I am a skeptic and do not believe in any paranormal or supernatural phenomena
whatsoever, I’ve long said that if one such phenomenon turned out to be real,
Bigfoot would in some sense be the least shocking, since a big damn ape at least wouldn’t require rewriting physics or
anything (the way a God or telekinesis certainly would).

But turning from the hard facts to the psychology of such
things for a moment: why, why, why would anyone watch a video like this and
think that “Guy in a black jacket stands up” is a less likely explanation than
“Honest-to-gosh mythical man-ape is captured on (another surprisingly crappy)
video”?They should do psych tests where
they prime people with different narratives including “Watch this footage of a
guy in a black jacket standing up” or for that matter “Watch the people freak
when this bear gets up on its hind legs” and see whether anyone still leaps to
“Bigfoot” as the likely explanation.

5. My apologies to
everyone with whom I’ve fought over questions such as how hard unions suck,
and in your honor, here’s one of my favorite Blondie videos, for “Union City Blue.”

6. My apologies to
perverts.I know it can’t be
easy.It has to be confusing being a
pervert and/or feminist at this juncture in history, with so little left to
combat in the way of tradition.Indeed,
it’s been left-wing pervs in each of the past few decades – think of Madonna,
Gwen Stefani, Lady Gaga – who’ve depicted themselves handcuffed, etc., and been
coldly callous about sex.But then
feminists blame conservatives for these sorts of brutal attitudes, even though
conservatives are usually encouraging very different sorts of activities, such
as chaperoned dating, avoiding premarital sex, or sending Valentine’s Day cards.

If something creepy is happening, it has to be the right
that gets the blame, in short, no matter how complicated the Mobius strip that
redirects the blame there.I can only
imagine the tensions that must exist within the mind of the average burlesque
performer in this town.But I shouldn’t.

7. My apologies to
all the non-human species I find so little time to write about, like my
family’s recently-deceased cat Pepper, the cats beloved by some of my
anarcho-capitalist friends, and that doggy burned to a shadow-like smudge by downed
electrical wires during hurricane Sandy.At least during the past year and a half of Facebook and Twitter use
(which I’ll now largely curtail in favor of book-writing, air conditioner
repair, or some other more substantive outlet), I did find time to link to many
cat videos.Here’s a kitty climbing a
chair, and he shows the potential to become as curious, bold, and clumsy as
Pepper himself.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Gawker notes that NYTimes reports that NJ announced that to deal with post-Sandy (price controls-induced) gas shortages, people with license plates ending in a letter can fill up on odd-numbered calendar days, whereas people with license plates ending in a number can fill up on even-numbered days.

But all NJ license plates (aside from vanity plates and other rare exceptions) end in letters. So now, every other day everyone in the beleaguered state will attempt to get gas. The next day, no one will. And so on, until the plan is inevitably abandoned as insane.

UPDATE: Or is it merely the Times that's confused? One NJ driver says the plan hinges on the final number on your license plate, no matter how your license number ends. Well, I'm staying in NY until things are back to normal, and then some.